My friend Sarah Bennight (@sarahbennight) is hosting this month’s #HealthITChicks Twitter chat on Thursday 9/17 at 1 PM ET. For those not familiar with #HealthITChicks, you can find them on Twitter and LinkedIn. This group typically focuses on topics related to gender diversity and equality within technology and related S.T.E.M. fields, leadership, work-life balance, government and global policy, health and well being, and the occasional reference to pop culture. They also host a monthly Twitter chat.
For this month’s Twitter chat, Sarah Bennight has chosen to talk about workforce challenges and topics like work-life balance. In fact, here are the questions the group will be discussing in this month’s chat:
1. What message do you think this sends young moms-to-be? Does it send the wrong message to aspiring women leaders who want to have children?
2. Does the amount of news coverage this topic received show that we are equals with men in tech fields?
3. Would a male CEO of a Fortune 500 receive similar coverage around his parental leave decisions? It will obviously always be different for a woman, since she has to deliver and recover.
4. One of the suggested articles mentioned we can work anywhere in today’s world. Has the modernization of technology made it easier for parents everywhere to enjoy both a career and a family?
5. IBM Watson just announced an additional four weeks of parental leave for employees, remote health IT jobs are everywhere, and “freedom leave” is becoming a leveraging tactic for hiring great health IT staff. Is health IT where we need to be for that work/life balance? How do we compare to other industries?
Bonus: What are some of the ways you maintain work/life balance?
Speaking of which. I’ll be volunteering at my kid’s school during the chat, so I’ll have to catch up after the fact. However, I’m really interested to see people’s thoughts on these subjects. I don’t think there’s any one answer to most of the questions. I do think that we can provide some good perspective on each though.
As a side note, #HealthITChicks is a great place to network with female healthcare IT colleagues (and a few male).